* Gain of 1 day by reason of crossing 180th Meridian, or International Date Line, between Port Darwin and Apia. Bob Giddings carried home a copy of this schedule, and the following Monday morning all four young men met by appointment in the private office of the publisher of the _Daily Independent_. After they were seated, Mr. Giddings brought forth the tentative draft, studied it a few moments, and then asked: "What is your fuel capacity, boys?" "Our tanks will hold enough gasoline and oil to carry us a little better than five thousand miles, throttled down to an average of one hundred and twenty miles an hour, the basis on which we figured out this schedule, sir," answered John. "Would it make a difference if you flew faster than that?" "Oh, yes," said John; "the faster a pilot flies the more fuel he uses per mile. Full out--that is, going at the limit of her speed--the Sky-Bird probably would not cover more than three-thousand miles." "I am glad to know this," said Mr. Giddings. "I see that your cruising radius is sufficient to cover your longest jumps at any reasonable speed. Let me see; you allow yourselves three hours' stop at each airport; will that be long enough?" "Plenty, sir," said Tom; "we figure that we can easily refuel in that time, and attend to any local affairs we may have." "I notice your total mileage is exactly equal to the estimated circumference of the world," remarked the publisher. "That shows great care in the selection of this route to meet my viewpoint; but may I ask how you know your distances between airports, as here recorded, are correct? From whence did you get these mileages?" "Bob and I figured them out, sir," spoke up Paul. "How?" "Why, like this, dad," explained Bob. "We knew there were 360 degrees to the world; we divided the circumference of 24,899 miles by 360, and obtained approximately 69.5 miles to a degree. By taking a map of the world and finding the number of degrees between any two airports it was not difficult to come pretty close to the actual distance in miles between them." "Very good; very good, indeed," approved his father. "I think I have the right sort of men on this job. But here is another thing which occurs to me: Have you based your time of arrival and leaving at each port upon local time or New York time?" "Local time," stated Paul. "If we had not done so we could not have arranged the schedule with any accuracy at all, as regards daylight and darkness and the lapping of time. With our watches set to New York time, we might expect to land at a station in broad daylight, only to find that we were really coming in after dark. Another thing: Our figuring showed us that the lappages of time, all added together, exactly totaled one day of twenty-four hours, which we gain by traveling eastward. So, while the schedule on a calendar at home would only show ten days which we would be gone, we would in reality be away one day longer, or eleven."